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The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.
C. S. Lewis
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I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
C. S. Lewis
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Mr. Neo-Angular – I am doing my duty. My ethics are based on dogma, not on feeling. Vertue – I know that a rule is to be obeyed because it is a rule and not because it appeals to my feelings at the moment.
C. S. Lewis
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No thanks," said Digory, "I don't know that I care much about living on and on after everyone I know is dead. I'd rather live an ordinary time and die and go to Heaven.
C. S. Lewis
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When humans should have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.
C. S. Lewis
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You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended.
C. S. Lewis
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As St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary, He told us to be not only "as harmless as doves," but also "as wise as serpents." He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head.
C. S. Lewis
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We must beware of the Past, mustn't we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past! Not so the saved.
C. S. Lewis
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Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?-Or at least, "Do you care about the same truth?
C. S. Lewis
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Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.'
C. S. Lewis
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To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will ever begin to compensate for failure in this.
C. S. Lewis
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Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.
C. S. Lewis
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A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women.
C. S. Lewis
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So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. But suppose God became a man... He could surrender His will, suffer and die, because He was a man.
C. S. Lewis
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I think it very wrong to pray for people while they are in distress and then not to continue praying, now with thanksgiving, when they are relieved.
C. S. Lewis
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Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God's eyes; that is, in our deepest reality.
C. S. Lewis
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That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.
C. S. Lewis
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Lucy went first, biting her lip and trying not to say all the things she thought of saying to Susan. But she forgot them when she fixed her eyes on Aslan.
C. S. Lewis
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It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.
C. S. Lewis
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Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines.
C. S. Lewis
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In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas." Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.
C. S. Lewis
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Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices.
C. S. Lewis
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If human life is in fact ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that his operations will often appear to us far from beneficent and far from wise, and that it will be our highest prudence to give him our confidence in spite of this.
C. S. Lewis
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One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.
C. S. Lewis
